Reading Messianic prophecies

As we read the early portions of the Gospels about Jesus’s birth and the prophecies which were supposedly ‘fulfilled’ by the events, we may be puzzled about the connections the gospel writers make. Sometimes, a closer look at the OT context reveals that a prophecy had a very time-bound historic significance (see, for instance, part one of my reflections on Isaiah 7:14 about Immanuel here). Other times, it is hard not to feel that the NT writers were taking OT verses out of context (e.g. Matt 2:15).

When there is divergence between prophecy and fulfilment in the details, or a clear fulfilment in the ancient Israelite context prior to Christ, we may need to re-think our strategies of reading. One suggestion for dealing with some of these difficulties is to see prophecy as having more than one fulfilment: a short- and a long-term one. In this model, the discrepancies between the two may be explained by the distance of the second fulfilment. This is sometimes compared to a far mountain range, which may look to the prophet like a single continuous mountain but as one gets closer it turns out to be several separate ones with details previously not visible. The value of such a predictive model is that it reassures us that God knows and holds the future and it may help explain some of the differences between prophecy and fulfilment.

An alternative approach to help make sense of NT reflections on OT prophecies is a typological reading. This is normally seen as way of relating the OT to the NT: the former provides a type or foreshadowing of what will come in the latter. To my mind, this isn’t necessarily a mysterious process, whereby God orchestrates events in a certain way, which will be replicated again mysteriously in the NT to match the earlier episode. Rather, God is the same God in the OT as in the NT, so it stands to reason that the principles that He built into the created order, as well as patterns of behaviour and their consequences will repeat themselves in different contexts. Thus, the NT writers look at the incidents around Jesus and find parallels with OT events that may help illuminate their significance. The advantage of the typological reading is that by thinking of the similarities between the situations in the OT context and their NT parallels, we become actively engaged with the challenge of God’s Word. The inherent message of such an approach is that we may be living in the same pattern observed in Scripture and need to respond to the same challenge. To see an example of this, have a look at my second post on Immanuel here.